As I mentioned in the War Inc. thread, I’ve been watching several movies that are featured in the excellent documentary Z Channel, which I re-watched and loved.
So far the most surprisingly good one was Turkish Delight (1973), an early Dutch film by Paul Verhoeven starring Rutger Hauer as a sculptor. Funny, sexy, sad, believable. Alas, that led to another Verhoeven/Hauer rental, Flesh+Blood , which was bad enough to leave unfinished.
But speaking of really bad films – or films that have the reputation of being really bad – what do you kids think of Heaven’s Gate? We watched the usual cut of it (219 min) over the past two nights and I shake my head in disbelief at the idea that this could rank on anyone’s list of “worst” movies (except Joe Queenan, who is a born fuckwit (let the Google linking of Joe Queenan and fuckwit commence!)). More specifically, let me ask you this: Why is Heaven’s Gate considered a disaster and Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven a masterpiece?
I admit, it starts out a tough sell. Opening with half an hour at an 1870 Harvard graduation ceremony featuring ponderous speeches by John Hurt and Joseph Cotten followed by fistfights and dancing, with barely two lines of actual dialogue between characters… Well, there’s still some important stuff in there in the context of the film, as well as a beautiful pre-figuring of the ultimate battle between the ranchers and immigrants enacted in the Harvard commons.
But once we’re out west, with Cimino’s tons of Fuller’s earth filtering every bit of sunlight, when the light’s not blotted out by locomotive smoke, the film is a thing of absolute beauty. As with The Deer Hunter, much of the communication between characters – or maybe it’s more correct to say between the filmmaker and audience – happens without dialogue. And even when there is talking, it’s liable to be in unsubtitled Russian, German, or drunk-mumbled Kristoffersonian.
Kristofferson’s Jim seemed to me every bit the unequal of his surroundings that Gere’s Bill was in Days of Heaven. I never got the feeling that those characters ever had the least bit of control over the frontier. I want to somehow contrast that with Kristofferson in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, where the character’s nemesis is just one determined man. Not wildfire, or political connections as in the Heaven movies. If not for Pat Garrett, Billy the Kid seemed indestructible. Whereas, the West would always have won against Jim. There is an amazing scene following the “resuce” of the mercenaries by the National Guard: The debris of war lies in a field, with no man or woman left moving. Then the wind picks up and immediately starts to erase the scene. The wagons start to blend into the earth and the dead are covered by dirt.
That final confrontation between the ranchers’ mercenaries and the “citizens,” as Richard Masur keeps referring to them, was every bit as harrowing and hard to watch as the torture and Russian roulette scenes in Deer Hunter . And while Kristofferson is a bit of a blank slate throughout, there are fine performances from Jeff Bridges, John Hurt, Brad Dourif, and whoever the hell that kid is playing fiddle.
And what… is a nine minute roller skating scene too much for you? Come on, it’s like a dream…
And of course, unsurprisingly, Christopher Walken’s Nate Champion, the only man in the movie to evolve, despite the fact that it will so clearly be for naught, is excellent.
Is this any less deliberate than scenes from Antonioni’s L’avventura? Or Visconti’s The Leopard? (I’m really asking on The Leopard, b/c I haven’t seen it yet.)
So, ignore the over-budget madness, commercial failure, Hollywood gossip and the downfall of United Artists. It’s now 28 years later, and a quick ‘net search shows there are plenty of people still arguing forcefully on both sides about this movie. This is the rare American movie that deals strongly with class issues and is also staggeringly beautiful, features fantastic set pieces, and tells one version of a true story in American history that would be best not to forget, if the topics of immigration, poverty, and corporate power and influence are worth talking about today.
Arnab, I had a couple of YouTube clips I was trying to embed and they’re getting stripped out when it saves. Do you know why?
are you using the embed code from youtube or the url to the videos?
i suspect the latter, as i’ve managed to embed one of your linked videos.
I’ve avoided this because of the anti-hype (OK, so I’m easily influenced by other people). It is now in my Netflix queue. This seems like a good time and occasion to inaugurate a “winter movie club” shared movie just in time for the holiday season?
I was using the embed code from YouTube… Every time I save it, it disappears. I tried again, same thing – including taking your exact comment above from the source code. Same thing.
are you placing the embed code within some other tags or just pasting it in as is? the latter is what you should be doing. i’m not sure why it would work for me but not you.
unless for some reason it works in comments but not posts. have you tried embedding in a comment?
Yes, I tried putting it in both comments and in the post, and I was not using other tags (though I tried some anyway to see if they’d work, like the “code” tag. They didn’t).
Maybe a permissions problem? Are you a super-user? Or – actually – it might be a browser problem. I will try it in Safari rather than Firefox.
In any case thanks for posting the other clip.
(edit).
Hmm. Nope, same problem in Safari. (Feel free to delete all of these technical posts if you want).
you’ve been able to embed them before, right? so shouldn’t be a permissions issue. can someone else please try and help diagnose the problem.
Walken’s evolution in this film struck me funny.
If the above worked, then it proves that Mauer owes me a beer.
Oh: and I recall liking Heaven’s Gate a lot more than I’d expected, and I’d love a chance to see it again–maybe even to do a head-to-head with Days of Heaven, which I haven’t seen in a couple of years either.
The above didn’t work. From firefox, couldn’t embed Walken’s evolution. Which proves that Mauer owes me a beer.
I think mauer makes an interesting point in comment #4. Malick’s film, though extraordinarily beautiful, lacks the iconic punch of Cimino’s imagined American landscape. But arnab makes an interesting point as well, in comment #2: Malick’s film, which is late-frontier, avoids the pat conventions of the Western: the barn dances, the half-built churches, etc. Malick’s film has a simplicity to it that, when judged next to Cimino’s film, makes the latter seem plagued by excess, abstraction, and heavy-handedness.
John, Heaven’s Gate didn’t really strike me as particularly excessive. At least compared against a similar film of its time: McCabe and Mrs. Miller. In that movie, they build a freaking town. And Malick’s film strives to be simple… it was a story of individuals and not a big historical event that resulted in the deaths of many people.
In Heaven’s Gate, there are several crowd scenes, usually populated by the immigrants, which granted does not show them in a very positive way (cock fighting, arguing about the death-list, posing for the photographer, and of course the rollerskating…) But every one of these worked for me. There are so many other scenes that are just one-on-one: Walken shooting a rustler, Nate sitting next to the drunk-passed out Jim and trying on his hat, Bridges (which is Jeff Bridges’ character’s name) re-filling Jim’s booze, and Nate trying to propose to Ella, while she still demands payment from him for sex. None of these moments seem excessive to me, and they are as important to the story as the war itself.
The most excessive moment of the film for me is the Harvard commencement at the beginning. Apparently in the theaters, there were subtitles for the immigrants and some narration near the beginning by Jim, explaining his move west. The DVD version I watched contained neither of these things, probably a good thing.
mauer, I was pulling that out of my ass. I was just making fun of the fact that all that junk about embedding video distracted us from your initial question about the two films.
or did you know that and are playing me right now…
d’oh!
well, both. I knew you were kidding regarding the comments, but thought your out-of-ass arguments were good critiques… And as I was anxious to have a discussion about the movie thought I’d go with it anyway.
I am not a natural fan of westerns, but having just seen Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and a couple of Sam Fuller westerns (Baron of Arizona and The Man Who Shot Jesse James), Days of Heaven, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller… I have also loved the recent movies The Proposition and The Assassination of Jesse James, so I am feeling myself drawn to the genre for the first time since college (having watched a lot of John Ford there).
By the way,this thread is now the number one link for google seraches of “Joe Queenan” and “fuckwit.”
http://www.google.com/search?q=joe+queenan+fuckwit
Mike Reynolds’ succotash recipe:
Produce Pete with Steve Carell – Thanksgiving
Embedding still does not work….
it worked for you in the past, right? i have changed nothing, so cannot account for this problem.
I remember trying to embed video a few times, having trouble getting it to work, and maybe finally getting it somehow. I don’t recall what I did though.
Currently, WordPress allows us link files from YouTube, Google Video, Grouper, SplashCast, Odeo, and DailyMotion.
So the Steve Carell video cannot be embedded, but the Heaven’s Gate video can.
For Christmas, here’s a little Christopher Walken anecdote for all of you:
“Mickey Rourke and I were in Heavens Gate together; he had this tiny part and I was playing whatsisname. We were sitting up there in the mountains talking about… dinosaurs. And I told him about this thing I had read in some science magazine, that there’s a theory that dinosaurs really never disappeared at all. That in fact all they did was get smaller and smaller, their scales turned into feathers and they flew away-and that in fact dinosaurs are still with us, there just birds.
And Mickey said, ‘That’s interesting,’ and he started telling me about this movie that he was going to do someday about a boxer and it was called Homeboy. You know, I remember also he told me at the time, ‘There’s this guy, the fighters manager, and your gonna play this part.’ I said, ‘Okay Mickey, lets go.’ So almost ten years went by and there we were making it. And I said to him, ‘Why don’t I tell that story about the birds and dinosaurs?’ He said, ‘Right.’ And there is that scene at the beach with all the seagulls, talking about dinosaurs. It’s completely disconnected from anything going on in the movie, but I think it’s one of the things in the movie…It’s real. Here are these two guys who are really kind of victims, talking about the origin and destiny of dinosaurs.” — Christopher Walken, Film Comment, August 1992.